THE WORLD

THE WORLD; There's a Wall In the New Berlin; You Just Can't See It

Published: November 13, 1994

BERLIN—
THE Berlin wall came down on Nov. 9, 1989, for the same reason it went up on Aug. 13, 1961: to keep the people of East Germany from running away from Communism.

It worked only too well.

While it stood, 408 people died trying to cross it and other parts of the fortified border between the two Germanys and the two worlds they belonged to during the cold war.

Now that it is gone, the wall still lives on inside people's heads.

Its collapse briefly threw Berliners together, but five years later they remain largely separate. The old border crossings are gone, and the vast inspection point on the autobahn that used to be West Berlin's lifeline to West Germany, with its scores and scores of lanes and police booths and customs sheds, is now just a wide spot on the west side of the road, noticed by hardly anybody.

West Berliners lead their lives today mainly in the western part of united Berlin, just as they did when West Berlin was an island of freedom in the Communist sea. East Berliners stay mostly in the eastern sector, trying to adjust to a social system with both risks and opportunities, chances of both unemployment and prosperity. Foul-Weather Friends

Many of them feel it is more stressful than what they had to endure under Communism, and hundreds of thousands of East Berliners used their freedom last month to vote for the former Communists, who they feel understand them and their problems better than western friends and neighbors who seemed to like them better when they could feel sorry for them from a safe distance.

The Brandenburg Gate, now a thoroughfare again, is as close to a symbol of unity as there is, and most people hardly even think about walking through it anymore, now that it is not walled off from both sides (shown here is a sign that warned those approaching from the west that the Communist sector began at the sign, not at the wall beyond).

Today people walk their dogs where the wall used to cut off the Bernauer Strasse; scores of people jumped out of their windows and leaped over the barbed wire at this point to get out in 1961, and some died trying. Nearby, a piece of the wall still stands as a memorial to them, but the crosses in their memory are gone.

Do Germans regret the unification of their country in 1990, or are they sorry that Berlin, restored as the German capital, will once again be the seat of government by the turn of the century? No, but the open wound the wall left in the country's psyche may take that long to heal. CRAIG R. WHITNEY

Photos: Then: Crosses once stood on the West Berlin side of the wall in memory of East Berliners who died trying to cross.; Now: The crosses are gone and the wall that blocked Bernauer Strasse is down. Now the divide is invisible.; Then: The Brandenburg Gate.; Now: A symbol of German unity. (Photographs by HANS-PETER STIEBING/Zenit)